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<i>Jurassic Park</i> was right about 'raptors'

Part of the trackway in China shows several prints from one creature, roughly 1 metre apart. The large-clawed toe is held clear of the ground

Video: A computer-generated view of a Dromaeopodus shandongensis footprint illuminated to better show its shape

Jurassic Park had the right ideas about “raptor” dinosaurs – they were big, they were bad, and they roamed in packs – at least when they lived in Shandong Province, China, 120 to 100 million years ago, a fossil trackway shows. It is the first solid evidence of group behaviour among the speedy two-legged predators.

The movie depicted Velociraptor as a cunning and deadly predator of near-human size, while in fact the creature was turkey sized. However, palaeontologists later found a much larger related dinosaur called Utahraptor in Utah, which is on the same scale as the movie raptor.

There had been no evidence of pack hunting, however, or that the dinosaurs had lifted the deadly-looking specialised claw found on one toe of each foot to keep it from wearing on the ground, another behaviour shown in the movie.

Now a trackway found by Rihui Li of the Qingdao Institute of Marine Geology in China shows footprints left by six Dromeosaurs – the more formal name for raptors. Their paths do not overlap where the animals walked alongside a river or stream.

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The nature of the rock tells us that there cannot have been much time between the tracks being made and being buried by stream deposits in the Cretaceous period, says Martin Lockley of the Dinosaur Tracks Museum at the University of Colorado at Denver, US, and co-author of a report on the prints.

Large cougar

“This strongly indicates that the track makers were there at the same time – moving as a group,” he says. The team has named the tracks Dromaeopodus shandongensis after the province in which they were found.

The tracks are 28 centimetres long and 12 cm wide. Each track shows two long toes, but only a stub of the toe bearing the long claw, indicating the animal held the claw off the ground.

The shape identifies the track-makers as dromeosaurs, and the imprint size indicates the dinosaurs stood about 1.2 metres tall at the hip – “almost as big as Utahraptor”, says Peter Makovicky of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, also involved in the work.

The track-makers would have weighed about as much as a large cougar or jaguar – approximately 90 kilograms (200 pounds).

The prints are the first evidence of larger dromeosaurs at that time in Asia. Palaeontologists had thought it likely there would be big ones in the region because small ones already existed there, and the large Utahraptor – which roamed North America at this time – was probably descended from raptors that evolved in China.